“The Complete Works of Alvaro de Campos” by Fernando Pessoa (translated by Margaret Jull Costa and Patricio Ferrari)

Pessoa wrote under many heteronyms. Campos was a poet and a sensualist. He did not intellectualize, but felt. “May God either change my life or end it.” In another poem, Campos again pontificates on death, “Once the session is over and we leave,/ There’s no house to go home to, no car to take us anywhere,/ but only Absolute Night and God perhaps like a Vast Moon/ signifying”

Campos was also a subjectivist, “Everything we’ve ever seen is us, we alone experience the world./ We have only ourselves inside and outside,/ We have nothing, we have nothing, we have nothing…” He was a dreamer, not a doer, “No, I don’t believe in me./ The lunatic asylums are full of madmen brimming with certainties!/ And since I have no certainty, am I more right than them or less?/ No, I don’t even believe in me… The world is for those born to conquer it/ And not for those who dream they might conquer it, even if they’re right./ I’ve dreamed far more than Napoleon ever did./ I’ve clutched to my hypothetical bosom more humanities than Christ ever did./ I’ve secretly written philosophies that no Kant ever wrote./ But I am, and perhaps always will be, a tenant in one of those garrets,/ even if I don’t live in one;/ I will always be one of those not born to do this.”

In his poetry, Campos also stressed the reality of the mind, “We all have two lives:/ The real one, which is the one we dreamed when we were children,/ And which we continue to dream as adults, in a substratum of mist;/ The false one is the life we live in the company of others,/ Which is the practical, the useful life,/ The one where they end up, putting us in a coffin./ In the other life there are no coffins, no deaths./ There are only illustrations from childhood:/ Big colored books, to look at rather than read;/ Big colorful pages to remember later on./ In that other life, we are us,/ In that other life, we live;/ In this one we die, which is what living means.”

Finally, Campos also wrote prose, which justified and explained both his poetry and the differences between himself and Pessoa, along with the other heteronyms. Campos expressed his own philosophy to life, “No age can pass its sensibility on to another age; it can only pass on the intelligence implicit in that sensibility. It is through emotion that we become ourselves, whereas through intelligence we become other…. Each age gives to subsequent ages only what it was not.” In prose, Campos also gave his literary opinions, “The superior poet says what he actually feels. The average poet says what he decides to feel. The inferior poet says what he thinks he should feel…. Most people feel conventionally, albeit with great human sincerity, not, however, with any kind or degree of intellectual sincerity, that is what matters to the poet.”

“Pessoa: A Biography” by Richard Zenith

Zenith had for years extensively translated Fernando Pessoa before deciding to undertake this 1000 page tome, a biography of Portugal’s greatest poet and, perhaps, its greatest philosopher, as well. Pessoa was an extremely odd man. His poetry was often written by heteronyms, not to be confused with pseudonyms. “Ever since I was a child, I’ve felt the need to enlarge the world with fictitious personalities—dreams of mine that were carefully crafted, envisaged with photographic clarity, and fathomed to the depths of their souls.” These were not mere imaginary friends, but embodied lives that lived within Pessoa. “Today I have no personality: I have divided all my humanness among the various authors whom I’ve served as literary executor. Today I am the meeting-place of a small humanity that belongs only to me…. I can remember envisioning the shape, motions, character, and life story of various unreal figures who were as visible and as close to me as the manifestations of what we call, perhaps too hastily, real life.” Pessoa had a humor about it all. “Given the dearth of people he can get along with, what can a man of sensibility do but invent his own friends, or at least his intellectual companions?” Zenith adds, “Pessoa accepted that there was no essential self he would ever know. But he hoped to discover the place and significance of the relative self—the ever-changing person or ensemble of persons called Fernando Pessoa—in the grand scheme of things.”

The heteronyms living inside his head were something that Pessoa actively thought about and cultivated. He digs down into his method, “Let’s suppose that a supremely depersonalized writer, such as Shakespeare, instead of creating the character Hamlet as part of a play, had created him simply as a character, without any play. He would have created, so to speak, a play of just one character—a prolonged analytical monologue.” Zenith compares two of Pessoa’s most prodigious heteronyms, Alberto Caeiro and Bernardo Soares, “Caeiro had celebrated the outer world, all that is knowable through vision, hearing, and the other senses. He prided himself, on being “superficial,” asserting that reality has no inner “depth” except in our confused thinking. Soares, while seeing everything with no less clarity, internalized the world and then—in an instantaneous turnaround—externalized his sensations of it. His world included dreams and imagined things as well as things seen.” Caeiro insisted, “Behold the world!” Soares, “I am, in large measure, the selfsame prose I write, I unroll myself in sentences  and paragraphs, I punctuate myself…. I’ve made myself into the character of a book, a life one reads.” We will give Pessoa the last word,

In this world where we forget,

We are shadows of who we are,

And the real actions we perform

In the other world, where we live as souls,

Are here wry grins and appearances.

Pessoa’s aesthetic and artistic styles were as varied as his stable of heteronyms. Even writing as himself, he often contradicted himself, fibbed, and embellished. He once declaimed, “Superior artistic production is, by its nature, a product of decadence and degeneration.” He was a supreme degenerate, but only in the philosophical sense. He later claimed, “I was never convinced of what I believed in. I filled my hands with sand, called it gold, and opened them up to let it slide through. Words were my only truth.” As Alberto Caeiro,

If I die very young, take note:

I was never more than a child who played.

I was heathen like the sun and the water,

With a universal religion that only humans lack.

Pessoa’s politics, like everything in his life, were complicated. He was, above all, an individualist and a lover of personal liberty and freedom, both in art and in life. He also loved his homeland, in an abstract sense, though he also did love Lisbon, particularly (and in reality). Pessoa claimed, “My nation is the Portuguese language.” Words were his truths. Zenith expands, “Pessoa rejected fascism and other radical nationalisms for the same reason he rejected ideologies of class struggle such as communism: they reduced the individual to an interchangeable unit at the service of some higher, collective reality such as the nation, or the proletariat…. The only social reality, [Pessoa] insisted, is the individual.” As Alberto Caeiro,

They spoke to me of people, and of humanity.

But I’ve never seen people, or humanity.

I’ve seen various people, astonishingly dissimilar,

Each separated from the next by an unpeopled space.

Being Fernando Pessoa was no easy task. “What Hells and Purgatories and Heavens I have inside me! But who sees me do anything that disagrees with life—me, so calm and peaceful?” As Alvaro de Campos, he admits, “In each corner of my soul there’s an altar to a different god.” As Bernardo Soares, “What I am would be unbearable if I couldn’t remember what I’ve been.” For his entire life, Pessoa also struggled to understand others. It was not for want of trying. As Bernardo Soares, “How other people can exist, how there can be souls that aren’t mine, consciousnesses that have nothing to do with my own, which—because it’s a consciousness—seems to me like the only one.” Pessoa had enough trouble with the stable of consciousnesses just contained within his own head. “All of us, in our human and realized life, are but the caricature of our soul. We are always less than what we are. We are always a grotesque translation of what we wished to be, of what we inwardly and truly are.”

Pessoa’s reading interests were varied, but he always had a special place in his heart for all things mystical, occult, and esoteric. He often cast horoscopes for himself, his friends, and his heteronyms. He took it all deadly seriously and lived his life by what the horoscopes revealed. He also created and populated various secret societies and orders, complete with their own complex series of rituals, all in his own mind. “My brother, everything in this world is symbol and dream—symbols whatever we have, dreams whatever we desire. The whole universe, to which we belong through error and as punishment, is an allegory whose meaning you understand today since your eyes, being closed, are open, and your ears, being covered, are finally able to hear.” In one of his few book-length works published during his lifetime, “The Message”, Pessoa writes, as Portugal’s mythical long-lost King Sebastian returned,

Without madness what is man

But a healthy beast,

A postponed corpse that breeds?

“The Complete Works of Alberto Caeiro” by Fernando Pessoa (translated by Margaret Jull Costa)

Pessoa said of his heteronym, Caeiro, “If there is a part of my work that bears the ‘stamp of sincerity,’ that part is the work of Caeiro.” Caeiro, himself, writes in one of his first poems, “I have no ambitions or desires./ Being a poet is not my ambition./ It’s my way of being alone.” Most of Caeiro’s poems dealt with the concreteness of nature. “But if God is the flowers and the trees/ And the hills and the sun and the moonlight,/ Then I do believe in him,/ I believe in him at all hours./ And my whole life is one long prayer and mass,/ And a communion with the eyes and ears.” He also wrote obliquely about the craft of poetry. “And I, if they come and ask me what I have done,/ Will say: I looked at things, nothing more.” Many of his poems deal with the peace associated with being in the moment and the futility of humanity. In a short poem, quoted in full, he states, “A carriage passed along the road, and was gone;/ And the road wasn’t anymore beautiful, or any uglier./ So it is with human actions in the world./ We take nothing away and we add nothing; we pass and we forget;/ And the sun is always the same sun every day.” In another poem, he claims, “Nature never remembers, which is why it’s beautiful.” He is a materialist, who doesn’t search in nature for metaphors or anthropomorphic qualities. “Because everyone loves flowers for being beautiful, but I’m different./ And everyone loves the trees for being green and giving shade, but/   I don’t./ I love the flowers for being flowers, that’s all./ I love the trees for being trees, without the addition of my thoughts.” Caeiro is decidedly apolitical. “I accept injustice as I accept a stone not being round,/ And a cork tree not having been born a pine or an oak./ I cut an orange in two, and the halves, of course, were unequal./ To which half was I being unjust—I, who will eat both, given that I am going to eat them both.”

Caeiro’s oeuvre comes complete with interviews with him, conducted by Alexander Search, a British polyglot, who translated many of Caeiro’s poems into English. Search was another one of Pessoa’s heteronym creations. Search introduces Caeiro, “The poet speaks of himself and his works with a sort of lofty religiosity which, in anyone with less right to speak in such a manner, would be frankly unbearable. Caeiro always speaks in succinct, dogmatic phrases, censuring or admiring (although it’s rare for him to admire) in such absolute, despotic terms, as if he were offering not a mere opinion, but rather stating an inviolable truth.” Caeiro later interjects, “To teach is to destroy. The only worthwhile thing in anyone is what he or she doesn’t know.” In one of his last poems, Caeiro states, “If, after I die, someone should choose to write my biography,/ nothing could be simpler./ There are only two dates—that of my birth and that of my death./ Between one and the other all the days were mine.”

“The Book of Disquiet” by Fernando Pessoa (translated by Margaret Jull Costa)

This is one strange book. On the surface it is an autobiography written by two people, neither of them real. Pessoa’s mind inhabited many characters, personas whom he called his heteronyms. They had their own fictional biographies, philosophies, and writing styles. Pessoa created complete imaginary worlds for each of these writers. In “The Book of Disquiet” Pessoa begins writing as Vicente Guedes and then switches over to Bernardo Soares, a semi-heteronym, because he is a mere mutilation of Pessoa’s own personality. The book itself is more treatise of philosophy than memoir. Pessoa pontificates on the meaning of life and other big questions through the heteronyms Guedes and Soares. Pessoa despises banality, even as he observes the everyday in Lisbon. His prose reads like poetry. With flowery verse, Pessoa gallantly describes the world he inhabits, while you get the feeling he is not quite of this world. There is a mysticism and a remove, though not an asceticism by any means. He begins, as Vicente Guedes, by describing his soul, “My soul is a hidden orchestra. I do not know what instruments, what violins and harps, drums and tambours, sound and clash inside me. I know myself only as a symphony.” Life’s purpose is a constant theme, "Some have a great dream in life, and fall short of it. Others have no dream, and also fall short of it.” And the banality of the mundane, "The only thing that prevents the everyday greeting of "How are you?" from being an unforgivable insult is the fact that in general it is utterly empty and insincere.” Even as he describes the commonplace, Guedes despises it, "Practical life always seemed to me to be the least comfortable of suicides.” He thinks of himself as a man above the masses, “All pleasure is a vice because seeking pleasure is what everyone does in life, and the worst vice of all is to do what everyone else does.” Soares, Pessoa reveals, is more like his real self, in style if not in content. Soares, although a humble bookkeeper, also lives apart from the world, “For me, everything that is not my soul is, whether I like it or not, mere scenery, mere decor. Even if I recognize intellectually that a man is a living being like myself, my real instinctive self has always felt him to be of less importance than a tree, if the tree is more beautiful than him.” He ruminates on the escape of death often, “Perhaps death will wake us up, but there is no answer to that either, apart from faith, for which it is enough to believe, and hope, for which to desire is to have, and charity, for which to give is to receive.” Life for him is a living death, “We are death. This thing we consider to be life is the sleep of a real life, the death of what we truly are. The dead are born, they do not die. The two worlds have been switched. When we think we are alive, we are dead; let us live while we are dying.” Soares lives in his writing, not in his life, “I am, for the most part, the very prose that I write. I shape myself in periods and paragraphs, I punctuate myself and, in the unleashed chain of images, I make myself king, as children do, with a crown made from a sheet of newspaper or, in finding rhythms in mere strings of words, I garland myself, as madmen do, with dried flowers that in my dreams still live.” He barely touches on politics, except to decry its pettiness, “I always find it hard to admit that anything done collectively can possibly be sincere, since the only true sentient being is the individual.” For Soares, art and literature are the highest of pursuits, “The value of art is that it takes us away from here.” He is not tired by life, but seeks to live apart from it, “Tedium is not a sickness brought on by the boredom of having nothing to do, but the worse sickness of feeling that nothing is worth doing.” His metaphysics is one of disrespect, “The Gods are the incarnation of what we can never be. The weariness of all hypotheses….” He lives an unfulfilled existence in the knowledge that his personality could never properly be fulfilled, “I was more of a genius in dreams than in life. That is my tragedy.” Perhaps what Soares is seeking no man has found, “Freedom is the possibility of isolation. You are only free if you can withdraw from men and feel no need to seek them out for money, or society, or love, or glory, or even curiosity, for none of these things flourish in silence and solitude. If you cannot love alone, then you were born a slave…. To be born free is Man’s greatest quality; it is what makes the humble hermit superior to kings, superior even to gods, who are sufficient unto themselves only by virtue of their power but not by virtue of their disdain for it.”